Pitchers and catchers don’t report to spring training for another couple of months, but David Chandler is already getting ready for his busy season.

Chandler owns Rx Sport, a Norristown company than makes baseball bats. Its customers include Major League Baseball as well as players in Minor League Baseball, college and high school.

The late fall is a busy time for the company as its churns out its handcrafted bats for players to use in February as they begin preparing for the upcoming season.

Rx Sport recently secured a $500,000 investment from Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania. When asked how the five-year-old company plans to use the money, Chandler replied with two words: “raw materials.”

Rx Sport, which has 13 employees, makes all its wooden bats from maple and ash trees. Much of the timber comes from Pennsylvania, he said.

Chandler is formerly a high-end furniture maker in North Carolina, but got into the baseball bat business in 2008 after Major League Baseball was experiencing a problem with bats breaking — a potential safety hazard for both players and fans.

“That was the impetus,” he said. Chandler was confident he could apply his woodworking know-how to the batter’s box.

He decided to start Rx Sport at the same time his wife, Dr. Julie Moldenhauer, was being recruited for a surgical post at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. (Moldenhauer is director of the Garbose Special Delivery Unit at CHOP.] The family relocated to Chestnut Hill and Chandler embarked on a new career.

What separates his bats from others in the industry is that Chandler bats are handcrafted in a process that takes five days to complete, and includes a finishing process used to seal the wood and make it more durable.

All the wood he gets must pass more than a dozen quality standards — such as straight grain and the absence of chipping or cracking — before it can be used for a bat.

The finished product costs $200, well above the industry standard of $70 to $140 for a wooden bat.

The company’s bats are priced at a premium for a reason, Chandler said.

“These bats, if used properly, will last and last and last and last,” he said. “We made [former Philadelphia Phillies outfielder] Raul Ibanez a bat in February of 2012 and he was still hitting home runs with it in the World Series in October.”

Players have calculated that when daily batting practice over the course of spring training and a season are factored in, they have had a single bat that has made contact with a baseball more than 40,000 times.

“What we offer is precision, accuracy, performance and reliability,” Chandler said. “We are making their most important tool. It’s like making a violin for a first chair or a scalpel for a surgeon.”

The company now offers 600 models of Chandler Bats. He said players will bring him their bats made by a different manufacturer and ask him to duplicate the dimensions.

“Anybody can come in and look at them,” he said. “If someone wants to spend three hours going through them all to find one they like, that’s fine. I’ll make it for him.”

Chandler said the materials and process the company uses making its bats remains the same whether the customer is an elite Major Leaguer or an amateur teenager playing American Legion ball.

Rx Sport doesn’t have a big promotional budget to promote its bats. Chandler relies on word-of-mouth for advertising. “Players talk to each other all the time,” he said.

The winner and runner-up of the 2013 Major league Baseball Home Run Derby — Washington National’s Bryce Harper and Oakland A’s Yoenis Cespedes, respectively — both use Chandler bats. Phillies players Dominic Brown and Carlos Ruiz also use the company’s bats.

Chandler isn’t one for setting a target on how many players he would like to see using his bats.

“I don’t have a specific goal,” he said. “We’ll continue to let the market dictate how successful we are and the following we have.”